Even after winning a Pulitzer Prize, reporter John Camp
realized it wasn't enough to put his two kids through college.

So he quit his job at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, refashioned
himself as mystery writer John Sandford, and began writing a series of
detective thrillers featuring stylish Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport.

The 14th installment, Naked
Prey, opened at the top of the best-seller lists in May, then was
bumped to No. 2 by The DaVinci Code. It's the third time a Sandford
hardcover book has hit No. 1 on The New York Times list, after Easy Prey in 2000 and Chosen Prey in 2001, and the first time he's
debuted at No. 1. The paperback version of Sandford's last book, Mortal Prey, also is on the best-seller
lists.

"You can teach yourself how to write thrillers the same way
you can teach yourself how to write journalism," says Sandford, who compares
himself to a carpenter when it comes to constructing his novels.

"It's simply a different kind of writing."

In Naked Prey (Putnam,
$29.95), Davenport finds himself yanked out of the big city and plunged into a
mystery in the flatlands of far northwestern Minnesota. The naked bodies of a
black man and a white woman are found hanging from a tree, and it's up to
Davenport  now the governor's political "fixer"  to quell talk of a
lynching.

Like all of Sandford's books, Naked
Prey opens with a bang as the killer ambushes his victims at an
isolated farmhouse during a blizzard.

Sandford says its critical to hook the reader with the first
page. To do that, he skips context and relies instead on action.

"Things are already going. The guy's already in the car and
he's following a woman and he's got a shotgun and something terrible is about
to happen. How can you stop reading at that point?" he says.

Sandford also says he puts "sensual stuff" in the first few
paragraphs  especially how things taste and smell  to draw the
reader in.

"So if you say that, 'He walked into a place and it smelled
like marijuana and pizza,' it gives you an immediate image ... that you're
talking about something kind of cheap and drug-soaked," he says.

His detective character, Davenport, creates computer games and
favors expensive suits. In Naked Prey, he's
also dealing with some changes in his life: he now works for the Minnesota
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and he has a new wife and baby.

Sandford calls Davenport a composite of cops and movie stars,
such as Clint Eastwood.

"This is a construction, and it's not an inspiration. It's
like carpentry. 'Davenport is tall, rich, good-looking, blue-eyed, drives a
Porsche, chases women, likes to fight, carries a gun,'" Sandford says.

Those qualities impress both men and women, Sandford says.
"There aren't any people like this, or very few of them. I've never met one,"
he says. (Sandford himself is tall  6'2"  with white hair and
eyebrows. He dressed casually in jeans and a dark shirt for an interview.)

If he were casting a movie, Sandford says he would choose
actor Daniel Day-Lewis  a "tough, slender guy"  to play Davenport.
He says the character would look like NBA coach Pat Riley  slicked-back
hair, sharp suits and a hawkish face.

But even though he's a movie buff, Sandford says he's not
interested in seeing his creation brought to the big screen. (He says he
doesn't care for the 1999 ABC-TV version of Mind
Prey, which featured Eriq LaSalle of E.R. as Davenport.)

"One of the problems with movies is I don't care enough about
them. And you actually have to kind of care to really get things done. You have
to kind of schmooze a little bit and you have to talk to people," he says.

Instead, Sandford prefers the solitude of his downtown St.
Paul office, where he can work from 10 until 2 at night, a habit carried over
from his late nights working at morning newspapers.

His cluttered office even looks like a newsroom. On the
shelves sit copies of his own books as well as books about cops and crime.
Framed posters of his book jackets are in the hallway, and on the walls are
huge maps of Minnesota, including one next to his computer terminal.

Giving readers a sense of place is critical, says Sandford,
who set all his previous novels in Minneapolis, except for one in northern
Wisconsin.

"I think people can figure out that I sort of know what I'm
talking about. It's not just something I made up," he says.

I've been in half the towns in Minnesota, probably," adds
Sandford, a native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who worked for the Pioneer Press for
12 years. He transferred to the St. Paul newspaper in 1978 from The Miami
Herald and in 1986 won a Pulitzer for a series on a southwestern Minnesota farm
family.

But even with a pay raise after winning a Pulitzer, Sandford
says he could afford to put his son and daughter through college. He wrote two
non-fiction books  one about Minnesota watercolorist John Stuart Ingle,
the other a collaboration with surgeon Bruce Cunningham of the University of
Minnesota about plastic surgery  before turning to thrillers.

"I knew about cops, I'd been covering cops for a long time, I
did crime stories every year of my life," says Sandford, a fan of mystery
writers Ross Thomas, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald.

He chose the pen name Sandford, his great-grandfather's name,
and in 1989 published Rules of Prey, about a
serial killer with his own rules for selecting victims. The book sold well for
a first novel and led to the Prey franchise, with a new book almost
each year. (The book's titles are chosen by Putnam editor-in-chief Neil Nyren.
"He only has to think of one word, like, you know, 'Naked,'" Sandford
says.)

Sandford says he has no idea how many books he's sold. His
publisher says 403,000 hardcover copies of Naked
Prey are in print, wile 1.3 million paperback copies of Mortal Prey are in print, for a total of over 1.7
million.

"After a while you become a brand name and that always helps,
because fans are looking for you and they sort of know what they're going to
get," Sandford says.

By writing seven days a week, it takes Sandford seven or eight
months to write a book. He says he'll finish his next Prey book 
set on northeastern Minnesota's Iron Range and involving an old network of
Communist Russian spies  in early December. The
Hanged Man's Song, the next book in his other series about a computer
genius and artist named Kidd, comes out Nov. 10.

And Sandford has "a different intellectual life," as an
archaeologist. He spoke two days before he was scheduled to leave for the Tel Rehov project, a dig he sponsors in
northeastern Israel. He'll spend the next seven weeks there.

At 59, Sandford wonders how long he'll continue writing.

"But what's a writer supposed to do?" he asks. "It's not like
working for a company, where you are looking forward to a time when you've got
some freedom."

Webmaster @ JohnSandford . org13 August 2018

The Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series,
the Kidd series, The Singular Menace, The Night Crew, Dead
Watch, The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle,
and Plastic Surgery: The Kindest Cut are copyrighted by John Sandford.
All excerpts are used with permission.